RUTHFULLY YOURS

Written in September 1999 by Garry Wills. professor and historian…….

MARCH 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration as President, began in a driving rain that raddled Washington’s famously muddy thoroughfares — women would wear the mud caked to their long dresses throughout the day’s ceremonies. Walt Whitman saw Lincoln’s carriage dash through the rain “on sharp trot” from the White House to the Capitol, scene of the swearing-in. He thought Lincoln might have preceded the tacky parade in order to avoid association with a muslin Temple of Liberty or a pasteboard model of the ironclad Monitor. Though Whitman was a close observer of the President, and would shadow him throughout this day, there was no way for Lincoln to recognize him in the crowd.

It was otherwise with Frederick Douglass. After the parade had arrived at the Capitol’s east portico and the presidential company had come out, Lincoln recognized the civil-rights leader from Douglass’s earlier visits to the White House. He pointed him out to Andrew Johnson, who had just been sworn in as Vice President in the Senate chamber. Douglass thought Johnson looked drunk, but did not know what a fool the Tennessean had made of himself after taking the oath. After Johnson had given a rambling and slurred speech attacking privilege, he melodramatically waved the Bible in the air and passionately kissed it. Benjamin Butler, of Massachusetts, who later led the impeachment effort against Johnson, said in a public speech that the Vice President “slobbered the Holy Book with a drunken kiss.” Lincoln, who studiously avoided looking up during Johnson’s odd performance in the Senate, quietly told the parade marshal, “Do not let Johnson speak outside.” Perhaps Lincoln was trying to be compensatorily reassuring when he made conversation with Johnson by pointing out Douglass. But Johnson’s disoriented sullenness came out as pure hate when this former slave owner looked at the escaped slave who was now a celebrity. Douglass recorded the instant.

The first expression which came to his face, and which I think was the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion. Seeing that I observed him, he tried to assume a more friendly appearance, but it was too late; it is useless to close the door when all within has been seen.

Much of future tragedy could be glimpsed in that silent exchange of glances — and much of the problem Lincoln faced in framing a speech for this occasion. Johnson, who had served as governor of the border state of Tennessee, was just one of the many compromises Lincoln had been forced to make in his attempt to shorten the war and make reintegration of the nation possible. It is easy for us to think of reconstructing the nation as a task that came after the war. But Lincoln faced problems of reconstruction soon after the war began. He had to govern sectors recaptured from the South, to keep border states from joining the rebellion, and to woo wavering parts of the southern coalition. All this involved the use of carrots as well as sticks — promises of amnesty, discussion of gradual emancipation, bargaining over things like black suffrage. These in turn alienated the radical Republicans, who wanted no compromise on the question of slavery or black civil rights.

This was a fight that could not be delayed until the war was over, and it flared up most bitterly after the occupation of New Orleans, in May of 1862. Lincoln hoped to make Louisiana, with its high percentage of educated freemen, a showcase of the way the South could be reunited with the North on the basis of a free black work force. But when congressmen were elected by Louisiana’s provisional government, which seemed too conservative to Congress, they were not initially seated, and Congress continued with its own plan of reconstruction, entertaining such notions as that southern state lines should be erased and the conquered area territorialized. Lincoln feared that such congressional initiatives would reduce his flexibility in trying to bargain with the South. He placated the radicals with his Emancipation Proclamations (provisional on September 22, 1862, final on January 1, 1863) enough to be able to make his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction on December 8, 1863. It readmitted any state that could form a government of at least 10 percent of the electorate which was willing to take an oath of allegiance to the Union and to accept the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s proposal failed to affect the nettlesome problems in Louisiana (the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to those parts of Louisiana that were not formally out of the Union when it was issued). In December of 1864 Lincoln was still protesting to critics that his approach to Louisiana was merely a temporary expedient for putting the state back in operation, and that ” we can never finish this, if we never begin it.”

People were laboring through all these controversies as they labored through the mud to Lincoln’s inaugural ceremony. The end of the war was in sight — Lee would surrender at Appomattox a mere five weeks after the inauguration. But what would be done with that victory? Lincoln’s appeal for latitude in the use of executive power, on the grounds that it was needed for waging the war, would lose all force when the guns fell silent. What new authority would he argue for to reach new goals? This was as thorny a situation, in its own way, as that which Lincoln had addressed in his lengthy First Inaugural. Then he had had to explain what terms he would accept for maintaining peace (including a promise to leave slavery perpetually undisturbed where it already existed) and what terms he would not accept (secession). That was a legal argument, involving constitutional philosophy, with many fine distinctions to be sharply drawn. If anything, the legal problems were even more complex in 1865. Would the Confederacy be a conquered nation? Or would it be a continuing part of America, in which some had committed crimes and others were innocent? How could the guilty be distinguished from the innocent, for assigning proper punishments or rewards? On what timetable? Under whose supervision? Using what instruments of discipline or reform (trials, oaths of allegiance, perpetual disqualification for office)? And what of the former slaves? Were they to be allowed suffrage, indemnified for losses, given lands forfeited by the rebels, guaranteed work and workers’ rights? The problems were endless, and the very norms for discussing them were still to be agreed on. Lincoln had his work cut out for him, and his audience could reasonably expect a serious engagement with matters that were haunting everyone on the eve of victory.

MANY-LAYERED MEANING

ONLY against the backdrop of such concerns can we appreciate the daring, almost the effrontery, of the Second Inaugural’s most obvious characteristic — its extreme brevity. It is true that the Gettysburg Address is even briefer (272 words to the Inaugural’s 703), but that was given at a ceremonial occasion for which Lincoln was not even the principal speaker. No one expected serious discussion of national imperatives when the business of the day was honoring fallen soldiers. It is a different matter when a presidential address is given during a war that is collapsing into a potentially more divisive peace. Yet Lincoln almost breezily dismissed questions of both war and peace, saying that nothing in either called for lengthy treatment. Was he not able to appreciate the scale of the difficulties facing him? Did he think he could reduce them to manageable size by ignoring or belittling them?

That this bold defiance of expectation was deliberate is clear from the pride Lincoln took in this speech. Some have wondered if he realized what a masterpiece he had created at Gettysburg. He clearly knew that he had done well; but he expected to do even better in the years ahead — years he would not be given. He believed he had already equaled or surpassed the Gettysburg Address at least once — in his Second Inaugural. Eleven days after delivering it he wrote to Thurlow Weed, the Republican organizer in New York, that he expected it to “wear as well as — perhaps better than — any thing I have produced.”

Yet if this later speech was better than the earlier one, that was because it built on the earlier one. At Gettysburg, Lincoln had proved to himself and others the virtues of economy in the use of words. He had put many-layered meaning in lapidary form. He aspired to the same thing in his inaugural speech. This is the more surprising when we consider the full-blown nature of most nineteenth-century oratory, and the fact that Presidents had so few opportunities for making speeches at that time. They did not deliver their annual messages to Congress in person. They did not address the conventions that nominated them. They could address groups that came to visit them in Washington, but Lincoln tried to avoid impromptu statements. All the words of a man in his position had to be well considered. He had denied himself the chance to make campaign speeches in both his presidential races, for fear of saying something divisive. All this must have been frustrating to Lincoln, who knew well the power of his oratory — what it had accomplished in the “House Divided” speech and the Douglas debates of 1858, and the Cooper Union speech in 1860, and at Gettysburg in 1863. The temptation must have been strong to load his inaugural address with everything he had been wanting to say. Here, at last, was his opportunity, too good to be wasted, and at just the moment when major issues were being hotly debated and an intervention by the President was desired.

The first thing to admire, then, is the discipline that kept him from saying anything more than what he considered essential, just as at Gettysburg. The earlier speech was a model for more than its brevity. He used the same rhetorical ploy to begin the two addresses. At Gettysburg he would not dedicate the battlefield, though he admitted that that was “altogether fitting and proper.” In the Second Inaugural he would not make an extended speech, though he conceded that doing so had been “fitting and proper” at his first inauguration. (The phrase “fitting and proper,” occurring in these two short addresses, thus ends up being repeated in the inscriptions on the Lincoln Memorial.) Familiarity with both speeches has made us appreciate too little how unexpected this approach was at the time.

We most easily read Lincoln’s refusal to dedicate the battlefield as acting like a praeteritio in rhetoric: “I will not mention … ” But it has been mentioned in the very statement that refuses mention, and that device draws more attention, after all, to the “unmentioned” thing. So we expect Lincoln to say that he will not dedicate in some sense or other, leaving the impression of dedication at a deeper level. But Lincoln was not doing anything so tame. He did not distinguish different kinds of dedication. He turned the whole subject upside down: We cannot dedicate the field. The field must dedicate us.

THE defiance of expectation is not so obvious in the Second Inaugural, but it is clearly there, and is carefully stated in order to exclude things that people wanted Lincoln to say. He said that he would not speak at length, as he did in the First Inaugural (when he was “loth to close”), when there were important things to discuss. Now, in contrast (and this had to be a shocker to some people), there was nothing useful to say about the war. It took its course, and he did not even pretend to be steering it anymore, much less to predict the time of its conclusion.

The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

That impersonal last sentence, with its dangling prepositional phrase, reflects the nonassertiveness that Lincoln wanted to recommend at this point. To show that predictions were worthless, he pointed out how little the war’s development had been, or could have been, predicted.

Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

With the end in sight, Lincoln did not voice the expectable, even forgivable, emotion that most leaders would in such a situation — a declaration that the rightful cause had triumphed, as it must. “The prayers of both [sides] could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” To Lincoln, as he looked back, even his First Inaugural seemed to have been an exercise in futility.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it — all sought to avert it. While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

Events were beyond anyone’s control. War came of itself, the personified process overriding personal agents.

What was going on here? His audience had a right to think Lincoln disingenuous when he said there were no thorny policy problems to be addressed now, as there had been in the First Inaugural. His words sound almost eerily “above it all.” As the historian David Donald says, “It was a remarkably impersonal address. After the opening paragraph, Lincoln did not use the first-person-singular pronoun, nor did he refer to anything he had said or done during the previous four years.” Lincoln was hardly the one to say that no great issues were resolved by the war, or that high ideals should not be used for guidance in the waging of peace. His Gettysburg Address had been sweeping in its claims — that the war would demonstrate whether all men are created equal, and would determine whether popular government could long endure. Now he was expressing an agnosticism about human purpose in general, and a submission to inscrutable providence. This resigned mood seems inappropriate for bracing people to the task of rebuilding a nation — a nation bloodily wrenched from all normal politics and facing problems without precedent.

“PRACTICAL RELATIONS”

BUT it was precisely because he saw the staggering size of the problems that had to be addressed that he was setting a mood of pragmatic accommodation to each challenge as it came up. Doctrinaire approaches, he was sure, would lead to fighting the war over again in peacetime — which is what happened during Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson. Some people argued that the South had committed treason, had withdrawn from the Union, and should be treated like any conquered nation. Others felt that the southern states were never out of the Union, and that their citizens’ rights should be respected even as criminal acts were punished (mainly by the defeat itself). Though Lincoln believed that the states had not seceded because legally they could not, he did not want to let the discussion reach for grand theories or ultimate principles, since that would make the problems of living together again irresolvable. The Second Inaugural was meant, with great daring, to spell out a principle of not acting on principle. In the nation’s murky situation all principles — except this one of forgoing principle — were compromised. He was giving a basis for the pragmatic position he had taken in the Proclamation of Amnesty, which was deliberately shortsighted, looking only a step at a time down the long, hard road ahead. He defended that proclamation again in the last speech he gave, a month after the Second Inaugural. Speaking from a White House window to a crowd celebrating the war’s end, he read carefully written words.

The papers of late have been peppered with reports detailing how America is coming apart at the seams under the presidency of Donald Trump, the most recent accusation being that he sided with Klansmen against decent, upright advocates of racial equality in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riots. No surprise there, as Mr Trump could cure cancer and still find himself accused of putting nurses and doctors out of work, so the charge that he is soft on the Confederacy was no less expected than the media’s painting of masked Antifa thugs and Black Lives Matter incendiarists as blameless agents of tranquil amity.

As statues of Robert E. Lee and other Civil War figures come down on what is now a daily schedule, it might disconcert your typical arts-grad newsroom fixture to learn that another president was even more accommodating of Secessionists. From Ulysses S. Grant, as told to an American journalist, a memory of the Confederate surrender at the Appomattox courthouse:

On the night before Lee’s surrender,” said General Grant, “I had a wretched headache — headaches to which I have been subject — nervous prostration, intense personal suffering. But, suffer or not, I had to keep moving. I saw clearly, especially after Sheridan had cut off the escape to Danville, that Lee must surrender or break and run into the mountains — break in all directions and leave us a dozen guerilla bands to fight. The object of my campaign was not Richmond, not the defeat of Lee in actual fight, but to remove him and his army out of the contest, and, if possible, to have him use his influence in inducing the surrender of Johnston and the other isolated armies.

You see, the war was an enormous strain upon the country. Rich as we were I do not now see how we could have endured it another year, even from a financial point of view. So with these views I wrote Lee, and opened the correspondence with which the world is familiar. Lee does not appear well in that correspondence, not nearly so well as he did in our subsequent interviews, where his whole bearing was that of a patriotic and gallant soldier, concerned alone for the welfare of his army and his state. I received word that Lee would meet me at a point within our lines near Sheridan’s head-quarters.

I had to ride quite a distance through a muddy country. I remember now that I was concerned about my personal appearance. I had an old suit on, without my sword, and without any distinguishing mark of rank except the shoulder-straps of a lieutenant-general on a woolen blouse. I was splashed with mud in my long ride. I was afraid Lee might think I meant to show him studied discourtesy by so coming — at least I thought so. But I had no other clothes within reach, as Lee’s letter found me away from my base of supplies. I kept on riding until I met Sheridan. The general, who was one of the heroes of the campaign, and whose pursuit of Lee was perfect in its generalship and energy, told me where to find Lee. I remember that Sheridan was impatient when I met him, anxious and suspicious about the whole business, feared there might be a plan to escape, that he had Lee at his feet, and wanted to end the business by going in and forcing an absolute surrender by capture. In fact, he had his troops ready for such an assault when Lee’s white flag came within his lines.

I went up to the house where Lee was waiting. I found him in a fine, new, splendid uniform, which only recalled my anxiety as to my own clothes while on my way to meet him. I expressed my regret that I was compelled to meet him in so unceremonious a manner, and he replied that the only suit he had available was one which had been sent him by some admirers in Baltimore, and which he then wore for the first time. We spoke of old friends in the army. I remembered having seen Lee in Mexico. He was so much higher in rank than myself at the time that I supposed he had no recollection of me. But he said he remembered me very well. We talked of old times and exchanged inquiries about friends. Lee then broached the subject of our meeting.

I told him my terms, and Lee, listening attentively, asked me to write them down. I took out my ‘manifold’ order-book and pencil and wrote them down. General Lee put on his glasses and read them over. The conditions gave the officers their side-arms, private horses, and personal baggage. I said to Lee that I hoped and believed this would be the close of the war; that it was most important that the men should go home and go to work, and the government would not throw any obstacles in the way. Lee answered that it would have a most happy effect, and accepted the terms.

Corporate America will do almost anything to stay on the safe side of public opinion—at least as it’s defined by the media. CEOs will apologize, grovel, resign, settle. They will even, as of this month, legitimize and fund an outfit that exists to smear conservatives.

The press is still obsessing over President Trump’s incompetent handling of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and that has suited some profiteers just fine. The notorious Southern Poverty Law Center is quietly cashing in on the tragedy, raking in millions on its spun-up reputation as a group that “fights hate.” Apple CEO Tim Cook informed employees that his company is giving $1 million to SPLC and matching employee donations. J.P. Morgan Chase is pitching in $500,000, specifically to further the SPLC’s “work in tracking, exposing and fighting hate groups and other extremist organizations,” in the words of Peter Scher, the bank’s head of corporate responsibility.

What Mr. Scher is referring to is the SPLC’s “Hate Map,” its online list of 917 American “hate groups.” The SPLC alone decides who goes on the list, but its criteria are purposely vague. Since the SPLC is a far-left activist group, the map comes down to this: If the SPLC doesn’t agree with your views, it tags you as a hater.

Let’s not mince words: By funding this list, J.P. Morgan and Apple are saying they support labeling Christian organizations that oppose gay marriage as “hate groups.” That may come as a sour revelation to any bank customers who have donated to the Family Research Council (a mainstream Christian outfit on the SPLC’s list) or whose rights are protected by the Alliance Defending Freedom (which litigates for religious freedom and is also on the list).

Similarly put out may be iPhone owners who support the antiterror policies espoused by Frank Gaffney’s Washington think tank, the Center for Security Policy (on the SPLC’s list). Or any who back the proposals of the Center for Immigration Studies (on the list).

These corporations are presumably in favor of the SPLC’s practice of calling its political opponents “extremists,” which paints targets on their backs. The group’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” lists Mr. Gaffney (who worked for the Reagan administration); Maajid Nawaz (a British activist whose crimes include tweeting a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad ); and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali refugee who speaks out against Islamic extremism).

The SPLC has tarred the respected social scientist Charles Murray, author of the well-regarded book “Losing Ground,” as a “white nationalist.” Mr. Murray has been physically assaulted on campus as a result. He happens to be married to an Asian woman and has Asian daughters, so the slur is ludicrous. But what’s a little smearing and career destruction if J.P. Morgan Chase gets some good headlines?

It isn’t only the lists. An honest outfit tracking violent groups would keep to straightforward descriptions and facts. Instead, the SPLC’s descriptions of people are brutally partisan, full of half-truths and vitriol designed to inspire fury.

We’ve seen what this kind of fury can do in Europe, with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the controversial filmmaker, by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamic fanatic. Ms. Hirsi Ali, who had worked with Van Gogh, still travels with security—and J.P. Morgan thinks it appropriate to further target her? In 2012 a gay-marriage supporter named Floyd Corkins smashed into the Family Research Council’s headquarters and shot a security guard. He told police he was inspired by the SPLC’s “hate group” designation. CONTINUE AT SITE

What we saw emerging in Charlottesville was the violent wing of the unholy alliance that exists in tandem with what is called “the swamp.” Democrats and even some renegade Republicans have their tentacles deep into our duly elected president’s administration with a malign purpose: to bring him down.

The ultimate aim is to overturn President Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton and usher in a pervasive, debilitating socialist and statist regime in America.

A friend and fellow journalist who lives in Charlottesville called me and pointed out that Virginia’s Democrat governor, Terry McAuliffe, has much to answer for with respect to the violence that ensued in his state and in Charlottesville.

According to my friend, the governor had deliberately chosen to spend the night in Charlottesville before the violence broke out. He had stayed at the city’s Boar’s Head Inn.

Certainly, eyewitnesses and reporters agree that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis, it was met with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks. Indeed, Antifa – short for “anti-fascist” – protesters came armed with pepper spray, bricks, clubs, and worse.

The most compelling question my friend asked was this: “Does the Democrat governor and mayor’s failure to secure the streets make them morally or legally responsible?” Indeed, McAuliffe had allegedly claimed that the white nationalists who streamed into Charlottesville that weekend hid weapons throughout the town.

Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving standards of probity.

In some cases, such damnation may be understandable if done calmly and peacefully — and democratically, by a majority vote of elected representatives.

Few probably wish to see a statue in a public park honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the racist Dred Scott decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.

But cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk.

In the present climate of auditing the past, it is inevitable that Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood will have to be disassociated from its founder. Sanger was an unapologetic racist and eugenicist who pushed abortion to reduce the nonwhite population

Should we ask that Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign from the Supreme Court? Even with the benefit of 21st-century moral sensitivity, Ginsburg still managed to echo Sanger in a racist reference to abortion (“growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of”).

Why did we ever mint a Susan B. Anthony dollar? The progressive suffragist once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”

Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II while he was California’s attorney general.

President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?

Wilson’s progressive racism, dressed up in pseudoscientific theories, was perhaps more pernicious than that of the old tribal racists of the South, given that it was not regionally centered and was professed to be fact-based and ecumenical, with the power of the presidency behind it.

In the current logic, Klan membership certainly should be a disqualifier of public commemoration. Why are there public buildings and roads still dedicated to the late Democratic senator Robert Byrd, former “exalted cyclops” of his local Klan affiliate, who reportedly never shook his disgusting lifelong habit of using the N-word?

Why is Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman, in the 20th century, still honored as a progressive hero?

So, what are the proper rules of exemption for progressives when waging war against the dead?

Michael Chabon is a novelist who in 1988, in his mid twenties, shot to fame – or, at least, shot to that rather more modest commodity known as literary fame – with a novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I vaguely remember reading it. I think I reviewed it. I don’t remember if I liked it. I can’t imagine I loved it, because I think I’d remember that. I see from his Wikipedia page that he’s written several other books since then, but none of them has made it onto my radar, even though I review literary fiction and talk regularly to friends who do the same thing and who tell me about new books they’re excited about.

In any event, Chabon is still out there, and the other day, thanks to several of my Facebook friends, I became aware of a new article he’d written under the title “An Open Letter to Our Fellow Jews.” The piece wasn’t actually addressed to all of his fellow Jews – it was meant for those Jews who voted for Donald Trump and who have continued to back him even though his administration is, in Chabon’s words, packed with “white supremacist[s], anti-Semite[s], neo-Nazi[s] [and] crypto-fascist[s],” and even though Trump has a “long and appalling record of racist statements.” Despite this execrable record, maintained Chabon, Trump’s Jewish supporters have continued to make excuses for him and to argue that however bad it may look, Trump isn’t really an anti-Semite.

Well, Chabon insisted, such rationalizations are no longer possible. Trump’s Charlottesville remarks were definitive, demonstrating unequivocally that our President’s heart lies with the Nazis: “So now you know. First he went after immigrants, the poor, Muslims, trans people and people of color, and you did nothing….Now he’s coming after you. The question is: what are you going to do about it? If you don’t feel, or can’t show, any concern, pain or understanding for the persecution and demonization of others, at least show a little self-interest.”

As noted, I became aware of Chabon’s screed because Facebook friends of mine posted a link to it. The friends in question are New York Jews – and as far as they were concerned, Chabon was right on the money. A friend of one of these friends dared to offer a sane dissent: “I am a proud Jew and consider myself a Zionist. I have never heard our president utter a single anti semitic remark, as opposed to the left.” As for Israel, it has “never had a better friend, unlike Mr. Obama who trounced on Israel at every turn.” Verdict: absolutely true. But one of the Jews who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid wasn’t having it. “Keep supporting Nazis and the KKK,” she wrote. “Be proud.”

Do American Jews really believe that there is a sizable Nazi or KKK presence in the United States that represents a serious threat to them? Does Chabon? Chabon professes to deplore Trump in part because “he went after…Muslims.” By what trick of the mind do Chabon and those who agree with him shut out the almost weekly reminders of whom Muslims are going after? Chabon’s piece appeared on August 17, the very day of the Barcelona terrorist attack – after which the chief rabbi of that city, Meir Bar-Hen, told the Jerusalem Post that “Jews are not here permanently….I tell my congregants: Don’t think we’re here for good. And I encourage them to buy property in Israel. This place is lost. Better [get out] early than late.”

Riddle: What does a Democratic National Committee member say the moment he wakes up from a sound sleep?

Answer: The same thing he says during all his other waking hours, and the same thing DNC members have been saying for many decades: “Conservative racists and white supremacists are lurking everywhere…. Yeh-yeh-yeh … everywhere, everywhere.”

Consider the DNC’s latest pathetic ad campaign, which reads: “If Trump wants us to believe he does not support white supremacy, tell him to fire the enablers of white supremacy working for him in the White House.” What’s remarkable is that while the imaginary “white supremacy” of Trump’s aides and advisers makes Democrats squawk with fiery indignation, the DNC not only countenances a number of very real, impossible-to-miss racial supremacists of its own, but it actually celebrates and honors them.

In August 2015, for instance, the DNC issued a formal resolution officially endorsing Black Lives Matter (BLM), a black supremacist movement founded in 2013 by a coterie of revolutionary Marxists. Numerous BLM activists have openly called for the murder of white police officers — and in some cases white people generally. Moreover, the demonstrators at all BLM events invoke a famous call-to-arms by the Marxist revolutionary, former Black Panther, convicted cop-killer, and longtime fugitive Assata Shakur, in which Shakur quotes a passage from her beloved Communist Manifesto.

Notwithstanding BLM’s racist and violent (and Marxist) track record, the movement’s leaders were frequent guests at the White House during President Obama’s second term in office. One of those occasions was September 16, 2015, when BLM activist Brittany Packnett — making her seventh White House visit — proudly told reporters that the president had offered her and her comrades “a lot of encouragement” while exhorting them to “keep speaking truth to power.” The following month, the DNC invited BLM activists to organize and host a town hall forum where the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates could discuss “racial justice.” In December 2015, President Obama lauded BLM for shining “sunlight” on the problem of racist policing in America, and on a subsequent occasion he likened BLM to the abolition and suffrage movements, which he said were also “contentious and messy” but ultimately noble. And on July 13, 2016 – a mere six days after a BLM supporter in Dallas had shot and killed five police officers and wounded seven others – Obama hosted three BLM leaders at a lengthy White House meeting along with the legendary racist anti-Semite, Al Sharpton.

By then, Sharpton was well-established as “Obama’s go-to man on race.” Indeed, Obama had addressed Sharpton’s National Action Network on multiple occasions, lauding the organization for its “commitment to fight injustice and inequality,” and for doing work that was “so important to change America.” He had also characterized Sharpton as “a voice for the voiceless and … dispossessed,” and had praised Sharpton’s “dedication to the righteous cause of perfecting our union.” From January 2009 through December 2014, Al Sharpton – the most visible racist anti-Semite of the past generation – visited the Obama White House on 72 separate occasions, including 5 one-on-one meetings with the president and 20 meetings with staff members or senior advisers.

And the DNC had no problem with any of this.

Nor is the DNC troubled by the fact that its own National Chairman, Thomas Perez, who served as Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during President Obama’s first term, has repeatedly shown himself to be a profoundly ugly racialist. Under the rubric of “disparate impact” theory, for instance, Perez believes that bankers and mortgage lenders who reject the loan applications of blacks at a higher rate than the loan applications of whites — regardless of the reason — are akin to Klansmen. While such lenders discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print,” says Perez, their subtle brand of racism is “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.”

Former Justice Department veteran J. Christian Adams has given damning testimony about how Perez and other Obama officials believed that “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.” Christopher Coates — the Justice Department’s former Voting Section Chief — has corroborated Adams’ assertion that the Obama Justice Department routinely ignored civil rights cases involving white victims. And an Inspector General’s report released in March 2013 stated that Perez believed that voting-rights laws do “not cover white citizens.”

When the going gets stupid, the stupid turn pro. On Monday, in an essay due to appear in the forthcoming print edition of National Review, I wrote, “The Christopher Columbus protests are coming.” That very day, a vandal in Baltimore took a sledgehammer to what is believed to be the oldest Columbus monument in the United States, a 225-year-old work whose cornerstone was laid in 1792. For maximum publicity value, the vandal or an associate brazenly posted the video of his handiwork to YouTube as he gleefully narrated. If you’re not disgusted by the horrific damage to the monument, you might be a member of the “concerned activist” community that enjoys making its political points by smashing things to bits.

On the same day, the Christopher Columbus statue towering 76 feet over New York City’s Columbus Circle learned that his status is under review because he triggers the most powerful two officials in town.

As George Orwell saw it, in 1984: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

New York City in 2017 is a one-party place where high elected officials literally parade down Fifth Avenue next to terrorists who were convicted of shocking crimes in the 1970s, but where an inanimate hunk of metal commemorating Christopher Columbus that has stood in the city for 125 years is declared a menace to society. The hard-left city-council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito — who last made headlines when she appeared next to convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera on a float at the head of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in June — called for taking down the Christopher Columbus statue that stands on a column overlooking the vast roundabout named after him. The statue has been a proud symbol of the city since 1892, when it was first installed in honor of the 400th anniversary of his landing in the New World, and is closely associated with New York’s large Italian-American contingent.

“There obviously has been ongoing dialogue and debate in the Caribbean — particularly in Puerto Rico where I’m from — about this same conversation that there should be no monument or statue of Christopher Columbus based on what he signifies to the native population . . . [the] oppression and everything that he brought with him,” said Mark-Viverito on Monday.

That inspired the equally far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio, who marched behind Lopez Rivera in the Puerto Rican Day parade, to chime in that the Columbus statue “obviously is one of the ones that will get very immediate attention because of the tremendous concerns about it.” De Blasio has announced a 90-day review of “all statues and monuments that in any way may suggest hate or division or racism, anti-Semitism — any kind of message that is against the values of New York City.” One assumes that when de Blasio orders Columbus to be toppled from his perch, he’ll do so in the middle of the night (à la removals in Austin and Baltimore) for our own safety.

Start pulling on one strand, and pretty soon the cloth becomes unrecognizable. If the statue over Columbus Circle must go, why should the name Columbus Circle remain, or New York’s annual Columbus Day Parade? Why should that federal holiday be named after him anyway? Why indeed should the District of Columbia retain its name when calling it the District of Cesar Chavez would be so much more in tune with our times? Shifting political currents already forced one name change on Columbia University (when Alexander Hamilton was a student, it was King’s College). Once was seemingly enough. But administrators had better think twice before they order new stationery.

Dennis Prager conducted the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra last Wednesday night, and what had threatened to become another dispiriting episode in the culture wars turned instead into an evening of passionate advocacy for high culture and classical music. Santa Monica is one of the most liberal cities in California, so it was not wholly surprising that when the orchestra’s conductor invited Prager, a conservative talk radio host, to conduct a Haydn symphony for an orchestral fundraiser, a rebellion broke out among some musicians and the city’s political class. Two violinists in the ensemble, both UCLA professors, penned a letter suggesting that their fellow musicians boycott the upcoming performance. “A concert with Dennis Prager would normalize hatred and bigotry,” wrote Professors Andrew Apter and Michael Chwe in their March 27, 2017, letter. A webpage asked readers to urge their friends not to attend the concert, since attending would help “normalize bigotry in our community.” Local politicians weighed in. Councilman Kevin McKeown warned that the orchestra’s decision to invite Prager may “affect future community support for the Symphony.” Mayor Ted Winterer sniffed that he had “certainly . . . not encouraged anyone to attend.”

Fortunately for the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra, the boycott attempt, despite sympathetic coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, was a dud. And the concert was a rousing success that ideally won new converts to classical music and to the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra itself.

On Wednesday evening, no protesters showed up outside or inside Disney Hall, Frank Gehry’s famed curvilinear eruption of steel designed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The orchestra’s affable full-time conductor Guido Lamell polled the house, virtually full, before the music began. How many audience members were Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra attendees? he asked. A good number of people clapped in affirmation, leading Lamell to offer his sympathies for their having made the “cross-country trip” from Los Angeles’s Westside to downtown. How many were attending their first classical concert? Another burst of applause. Then came the key demographic question: Are there any fans of Dennis Prager here? The response was thunderous. “OK, I get the message,” Lamell laughed. “I won’t keep you away from him for too long.”

Lamell opened the program with a lively reading of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro overture, which he rightly introduced as one of the greatest opera overtures of all time (actually, its only competitor for first place is the Don Giovanni overture). Then he turned over the podium to Prager. Two string players joined the welcome, clapping with their free hand on their knee. Prager told the audience about attending his first classical music concert, which brought him to tears and led to a lifelong love affair with Haydn. The Classical period, he said, represents “controlled passion,” in contrast with the Romantics, who did not control theirs—yet passion will break out in the fourth movement of this Haydn symphony as well, Prager explained. Wonderfully, Prager had chosen a work from the criminally underperformed middle period of Haydn’s prodigious symphonic output. These so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies contain some of Haydn’s most pathos-filled, dramatic writing, and the Symphony No. 51 in B-flat major, composed in 1771, was no exception. It opens innocently enough with a brief, quizzical exchange between frisky strings and mournful horns before bursting forth into agonizingly poignant and dark harmonies. Cleverly syncopated passages in the first movement make the rhythm tricky. Major and minor keys interweave, adumbrating Schubert’s bittersweet longing.